Chris Warhurst takes the 2007-08 financial crisis as a point of departure to ask some important questions. What is the future of the sociology of work? Is there still a place—indeed a need—for those “ethnographic monographs on work and employment” that have long been the backbone of the field?   It was so disheartening to read that new introductory textbooks subsume work within chapters on tourism and sport; while there is “little teaching of the sociology of work and employment in Australia’s top universities.” Yet I don’t think that the problem lies where Warhurst suggests it does, with a dearth of trading floor ethnographies. What we’re confronting is a deeper crisis, what I’ll call a decoupling of work from profits. It is the real culprit behind the marginalization of the sociology of work, and it derives from the financialization of the economy.

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